"I love Stratego! Good or evil?"

Serena picks up a book. To her mind, if she scheduled Family Board Game Night, then her duty was executed and she definitely did not have to participate in it. 

"You can be good the first time. It's a purely aesthetic choice unless we're playing with the special powers."

"Oh, we always play with special powers! --No takebacks."

Special Narnia powers have no place in any Stratego game; they reveal where the characters are too quickly, and they make the game unbalanced by giving the good side straightforwardly more and better powers. (Which is, to be fair, sometimes fun when you're playing with someone younger or worse than you and you want to give yourself something of a challenge.)

She has them all memorized and is going to crush Fred anyway.

Nick sits down across from Keturah and watches her intently.

Keturah ignores him.

She keeps the witch and her spy within easy reach of her flag, and sends her nine in to attack Fred's forces, backed up by a goblin for misdirection and a cyclops to destroy the flag's defenses. She likes to think that her monsters are all very nice people, really, they've just been convinced by the white witch that they need to back her politically and militarily in order to prevent the the hostile takeover of Narnia by foreign English not-even-royalty. The animals and the English children, of course, believe that they must give their lives to take back the land from eternal winter. It's really very tragic, how everyone involved is too afraid and too proud and too determined to attempt to find a diplomatic solution to this mess.

When her seven kills Mr. Tumnus and nobody cries out to mourn his passing, she feels really deeply homesick for a moment. Mr Tumnus and Mr. Beaver are the two most useless good pieces, exactly as useless as the evil army's goblins; they have no special powers and they can't kill anything stronger than a three. To counterbalance this, she and her sister always used to cry out dramatically when Mr Tumnus or Mr. Beaver or one of the goblins was killed - they were so unprepared for this conflict, so small and so tired and so desperate to believe in their cause. She always used to give the goblins different names when they were killed in combat, to make it fair, and then talk about their little goblin wives and little goblin children and their hopes and their dreams and their sacrifice.

In this game, Mr. Tumnus falls silently, stabbed through the heart and forgotten by one of her cyclopes.

Okay, so, maybe no one playing this name will cry out when Mr. Tumnus dies, buuuuut Nick continues staring at her expressionlessly and without blinking. That's almost as good, right?

Nick is so much less important than the fate of Narnia.

The white witch's army closes off the main path to her flag by turning the good army's pieces to stone. This presents Aslan with a choice to leave his fallen comrades or to defend his own flag, the scrap of cloth that is the symbol of everything his army stands for. It's really sort of weird, if you think about it, that a piece of cloth is worth more than the lives of the talking animals or the children or her harpy or her little goblin fathers with little goblin sons, but that is how the game works, and Aslan would be a fool to ignore his own flag just to bring back Susan and an eagle.

Aslan defends his flag without the slightest bit of hesitation!

Stare. Stare stare. Creepy stare.

Aslan will succeed at taking the cyclops that slew Mr. Tumnus (which is as it should be, he's been avenged), which prevents Keturah from rampaging through the flag's defenses. Her nine falls back. Aslan might pursue it, or he might go back to his frozen comrades and lead an assault on her own flag.

Fred understands the point of this game! He will go try to capture Keturah's flag.

Staaaaaaaaaare.

Then destruction shall rain down around Aslan. Wolves have their throats torn out. Goblins scream in anguish, spending their final moments thinking of their wives and tiny goblin children, who they fear will grow up under an unopposed English colonial government. The living room is dead silent.

She can't actually oppose Aslan until he reaches the cluster where her flag is, unless he happens to run into a bomb. It's kind of thematically weird that Aslan can be killed by bombs and can't come back to life afterwards - weirder, if you think about the fact that the bombs in this game keep claiming to be magic - but that would probably mess with the game balance. Luckily, she doesn't have to stop him. Her threes rush out of Aslan's way, evacuating their own war-torn side of the board and heading over to Aslan's side, where they are in position for a precision strike on the flag. Peter will slay one, but Peter can be in but one place at a time. Another one dies on Lucy's knife. The third squeaks through, deactivates the bomb defending the flag, and touches its goal.

It ends as many games do, with one of the humble, ugly minoboars clutching a dirtied piece of cloth, moments before Aslan reaches his goal.

"Ah! It was all luck. Best of three?"

"Sure!"

Fred loses the next two games.

Nick's expression is unchanging. He seems to be deeply interested in Keturah's left eyebrow.

"Do you want to take a turn playing Fred?" she asks Nick. It's kind of fun to crush people but there's a point at which it gets sort of boring.

"Sure."

Now Nick is staring intently at a Stratego board, which is probably some kind of progress.

Well, uh, good for Nick.

She takes out her binder and reviews the Greek alphabet, occasionally looking up to see how the game progresses.

Every time she looks up, Nick is glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

Well that's sort of weird. 

She will practice her Greek alphabet and maybe stop looking up very much.

Eventually Serena puts down her book and says "it's time for bed, Keturah. "